Russian woman who returned to Moscow from Ukraine over paperwork charged with high treason after four months of ‘carousel’ arrests

Moscow investigators have opened a criminal case on charges of high treason against Svetlana Golovatenko, a Russian national who lived in Ukraine for many years but returned to Russia to renew her expired internal passport and re-register a flat she still owned in Donetsk, Mediazona has learned.

Svetlana Golovatenko entered Russia via Georgia. She was detained on 23 April in the arrivals area of Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, and the following day the Solntsevsky District Court ordered her detained for fifteen days on a charge of minor hooliganism.

Officials then drew up seven more identical administrative offence reports against her, each resulting in a further term of administrative detention, including two imposed in Kaluga Oblast. Her most recently known sentence, another fifteen days of administrative detention, was handed down on 4 August by the Kuntsevsky District Court in Moscow.

It appears that once her latest term of administrative detention expired, investigators opened a criminal case against her on charges of high treason. The Meshchansky District Court in Moscow remanded her in custody pending trial, Mediazona has learned.

Svetlana Golovatenko was born in Severoonezhsk, a settlement in Arkhangelsk Oblast. She spent more than ten years living in Kyiv, where she worked as a manicurist and pedicurist and held a Ukrainian residence permit. Her mother, father and younger brother remain in Russia.